With a decent 68k emulator, they could mayhaps a pulled a 3rd gen Amiga off.... I mean, Apple did it with the PowerMac, and later they managed to pull off a decent PPC-emulator so the older programs for the PowerMac's worked on the Macintel's.

I agree with the Paula discussion... although one of the most sophisticated 8bit soundchips ever (if not THE most), the 4c/8bit scenario was slightly outdated with the dawn of the AB16 and AWE and those.... heck, just "updating" it to use 8channel/16bit would've been a far jump ahead of the Creative chips. Especially when you think about how it also handled more or less all the disk-IO and also had a hand (or a byte :P) in other areas.

Denise could've been so much more in the Aga (Was that Alice? I never remember which of Agnus and Denise got the Alice-name )... I have been playing with the idea of whether or not it would be possible to make her use bitplanes up to 256 colours, then go chunky for 8/16/24bit colours. And given 4 MB dedicated RAM instead of 2 MB shared with the other special chips, she could've pulled off another generation of gaming.

Then, the chipset itself should've been upgraded.... speedwise, that is. Even with an 06/75MHz CPU on an accelrator card, the chipset itself only wen't on 14 (as was the CPU speed in the A1200)... upping the chipset speed to 25 or 33 MHz, would've given the Amiga a new lease of life "right there" and would yet again soar past the competition.

Would this be enough to save C= in the long run? probably not. However, if they could've taken more notice of David Pleasance' notes on what the cutomers wanted, and target the hardware threreafter, I would hope they could at least have lasted for another 5 - 6 years.

After which, the intel and AMD spaghetti-CPU's was going at 400MHz+.... and so the 4th gen Amiga should've gotten something even better..... I'm led to believe the PPC's at that time (1999 - 2000) could run at about 300 MHz? couple this with a chipset at 100MHz, a faster gfx-chip and a Paula-derivate capable of 64channel/24bit sound......

With just these small adjustments (and probably millions of £ in R&D to get them together :P) I believe the Amiga would've had a fighting chance.

But... it probably wasn't meant to be.... at least not with the people at the head of C=... I'm sure the shoenumber (in UK sizes) of the one with the biggest feet, was bigger than the combined IQ of them.